We’ve all experienced the closing scene of the Social Network. Dejectedly sitting, nay, slumping in an office chair, refreshing the screen every five seconds willing our eyes to visualize the positive note we are searching. Whether it’s a reply to our resume during the big job hunt, or a personal ad, we long to be connected and thus we refresh. Refresh. Refresh.

If only there was a button in our lives that could do that for our day-to-day activities and more specifically the messes left behind from the escapades of daily living. There is not giant button beside our thermostat that can restore our house to order, no machine that suck up article and spit them out polished, folded, and put away to startling perfection.

As of yet no great refresh button exists but there are areas of our home that we can refresh with little effort and much innovation.

Refreshing Carpet Fibers

Moving and rearranging furniture around the home can be a great form of exercise if you remember to lift with your knees- but it can also reveal repressed carpet fibers. This can be a terribly distracting dilemma, especially if others will witness the less than perfect flooring.

A cup of ice from your freezer and you can refresh that carpet with just a toss of ice on the crushed fibers. And that’s it. You let the ice do it’s magic and can merrily go on your way.

Refreshing Dishwashers

Although you have to load it, the dishwasher is one of those machines that is borderline a refresher-performing wizard. You pour a little detergent in, adjust settings and thumb in the start button. Several hours later you open the hinged door and unfortunately not only steam greets your face and fogs your glasses. Half washed dishes, dull silverware and hard clumps of food stubbornly clinging to their dearly beloved plates and bowls.

This is a serious symptom of a diseased dishwasher that needs refreshed sans dishes.

If you have a stainless steel interior dishwasher run a full cycle-with all the extras-using distilled white vinegar. For other interiors bleach can perfect your dishwasher back to its origins.

Refreshing Counter Tops

Our food may live in the fridge but it spends much of its life on our countertops. From the moment we bring our paper bags overflowing with produce and dry goods home we plop them on the counter. We slice our food here in the absence of a cutting board, we eat off it, we serve off it, we sit on it, we lean on it…we practically live on our countertops. So you have to admit it needs a good bit of fresh air.

While we often resort to chemicals you might want to try some food safe cleaners. Like lemons. If we can ingest them, attacking dirt with them will be harmless. Fresh lemon juice is often a quenched thirst refresher but it can actually “bleach” away countertop stains while filling the atmosphere with a clean burst of scent.

Bring back the vinegar from the dishwasher project and add some baking soda and you have a great mildew eliminator and cleaner. Great for backsplashes as we tend to camouflage this are with countertop appliances and fruit baskets. Trust me, it can get nasty back there!

So maybe that entailed more work than the press of a button, but as you can see the refresh method has brought the beauty back from our blah spaces. The good news has been received the confirmation of a clean surface and restored fibers has been worth the waiting and toiling. Ah, refreshed.